The Bush Administration's Outsourcing Disaster

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Dennis Kucinich has strongly criticized the position taken by the White House on the loss of American jobs overseas.

According to a report by the Los Angeles Times on February 9th, the White House has embraced the concept of “outsourcing” as a positive development for the American people and the economy. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, prepared the administration’s newly-released economic report which welcomes the outsourcing of American jobs. This same report promises to create 2.6 million new jobs. “Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said Mankiw in the Los Angeles Times article.

“Outsourcing” is a process in which American jobs, mainly in technological fields, are contracted out to countries where wages are significantly lower. According to the February edition of Wired Magazine, the typical salary for an American programmer is $70,000 a year. The typical salary for a programmer in India is $8,000 a year. U.S. companies are expected to ship 200,000 jobs a year to India in the foreseeable future in pursuit of these lower wages.

The Bush administration is embracing the loss of our technological base while promising to create 2.6 million jobs. These two realities cannot exist side by side. The continued loss of our ability to control the development of our technology, and the continued loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs, are issues of national and economic security.

"The outsourcing of US jobs is being accelerated with the help of NAFTA and the WTO, which make it impossible to place taxes or tariffs on such work,” said Congressman Kucinich. “Canceling NAFTA and the WTO will enable the US to protect high-tech jobs from outsourcing. This, plus careful monitoring of H1B visa practices, will slow the tide of outsourcing.”

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